


things worthy of seeing

by regencysnuffboxes (malicegeres)



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: AIDS mention, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, Edwardian Period, Historical, Holocaust Mention, Look I Try Not to Do Pure Angst But Like One of Those Tags Is the Weimar Republic, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Queer History, Queer Themes, Some Unhealthy Drinking But Like It's Crowley, That's History Babey, Weimar Republic, World War I, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-19
Updated: 2019-02-19
Packaged: 2019-10-31 07:59:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17845496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malicegeres/pseuds/regencysnuffboxes
Summary: A history of Crowley's associations with the queer community in the twentieth century.





	things worthy of seeing

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from a quote by Dr. Magnus Hirschfield from one of his books on transgender people: “The more we delve into the essence of personality, the more we learn that in this world, certainly rich with natural beauty and things worthy of seeing, nothing is more attractive and worthier of knowing and experiencing than people.” I did a lot of Wikipedia digging, but apologies if I got any of the history wrong.

Crowley had never given much thought to his own sexual proclivities as far as other people’s genders went. His own gender, sure, he put thought into it every time he got a new corporation or considered trying another gender on for a change of pace. But for most of human history, sex with anyone of any gender was simply something one did. Crowley liked people, from time to time on an intimate and personal level, and the gender of the person in question only went into his thought process with regard to how secretive they needed to be about it. Yes, there had always been bathhouses and Molly houses, to say nothing of Lesbos back in the day. Sex and romance were social things, and communities formed around them quite naturally whether they were supported by the law or not. But until Crowley awoke from his long nap in 1894, he’d never seen anything quite as organized as Aziraphale’s 'Uranian' aesthetes.

There was a dignity to them. The Mollies of the eighteenth century had always felt a bit silly to Crowley with their code names and uncomfortable pantomimes of childbirth, but Aziraphale's lot were poised and treated their community like a political cause as much as a political movement. Artistically they liked to indulge in prettiness and decadence, but they were ultimately a quiet lot. Literary, philosophical, studious. It seemed that Aziraphale had found the perfect crowd for himself while Crowley was asleep.

He wasn't sure what to make of that; Aziraphale wasn't what one might call a people person. He was excellent in one on one time, sure, but it was rare that the angel could be considered a true member off any sort of crowd. It certainly hadn't happened since the Arrangement had come about. And that was troubling, to be sure, because he was fairly certain it meant that Aziraphale had _missed_ him while he was away, and that had all sorts of implications Crowley didn't want to consider. It was also exhilarating, because somehow Aziraphale— _Aziraphale_ —had fallen in with a defiant counterculture.

Crowley approved of defiance as a rule. He’d been one of the first rebels ever to exist—and maybe that had all gone pear shaped in the end, but he still felt it was something to be proud of. And the thing about the nineteenth century was that it had advanced rebellion beyond what Crowley had ever seen. Morality and propriety were enforced a lot more strictly than they had been when he went to sleep, and as a result the new forms of rebellion were more sophisticated than ever. Peasant revolts had given way to unions and strikes backed by the most articulate workers’ philosophies he’d seen since the Diggers in the seventeenth century, France was on its third bloody republic, America had fought a whole war over slavery, women wore bloomers and were fighting for the right to vote (which a lot more people could do now), and here was Aziraphale with a posse who fought to love in a way that used to be punishable by hanging and was still punishable by hard labor.

Crowley didn’t spend much time with the aesthetes in their discreet gentlemen’s clubs. It was good for Aziraphale to have other people, and Crowley had a lot of catching up to do with the complexities of the waning century so he'd be ready for the next, so he kept busy finding new ways to encourage people to be terrible  to each other. He got them to bicker over the newer forms of mass media, judge the younger generations, give in to the new consumer culture, and, on occasion, because it inconvenienced so many people, be really bloody loud and annoying while going on strike to collectively bargain for better pay, shorter hours, and safer working conditions.

Then Oscar Wilde died. Aziraphale and his new… Mr. Ross were distraught, and Crowley was left at a loss for what to do.

Not that he should have wondered what to do in the first place. As far as he knew, Heaven and the British government had very different ideas of what constituted sin and the best course of action for a demon in this situation was to allow the British government and British society to continue their own sins of cruelty.

Still, he found himself hanging around the less discreet gentlemen's clubs without Aziraphale. They were the sort that popped up in all their decadent glory only to be closed down by too many police raids, which were then in turn replaced by new clubs that were even more decadent than the last. He kept a close eye on things, encouraging greed or lust here and there, letting the desperate conditions of oppression that bred sin and crime work their magic for him as they always had. However, if he overheard there was a warrant out for somebody's arrest for gross indecency, he didn't see the harm in making arrangements for that somebody's safe passage to sufficient room and board in France.

That little habit, of course, was what finally tipped Aziraphale off to what Crowley was up to. It turned out he'd helped one of Ross's boys make a miraculous escape, and once Aziraphale traced that back to a groundbreakingly degenerate club called the Cave of the Golden Calf (Crowley had thought he was being funny), there was really nothing to be done for it.

"I knew it," he said warmly over two small glasses of absinthe at a cabaret table. "You'll deny it, my dear boy, but you've proven time and time again that when the chips are down you really are—"

"I am _not_ ," Crowley grumbled, pouring another shot over his spoon and watching the sugar cube dissolve. "Look, that boy was going to die in prison, and now he gets to live out his days tempting people into sin in France. It's nothing but a win for me."

"All the same," said Aziraphale, "it was good of you."

"I can't just go around doing _good_ , Aziraphale. You know that. I'm in enough hot water as it is for sleeping through a whole century."

The angel gave Crowley his least favorite look. It was that one where the corners of his eyes crinkled with affection while the rest of his face contorted into a smug, skeptical look that said, "Aha! I've caught you in the act and there's nothing you can do about it!"

He glared at him. "Ssssstop that."

Aziraphale smiled at him, and then the band struck up a rag and he perked up. “It’s been ages since I’ve heard this one.”

“I’ve never heard it,” said Crowley, feeling rather subdued.

Aziraphale smiled and stood, holding out a hand to him. “Dance with me?”

Crowley took his hand gratefully, and Aziraphale didn’t press him again that evening.

 

* * *

 

Hell wanted Crowley to ensure that they were taking full advantage of the First World War, so he went to the Western Front to have a look.

Apparently War had been busy taking advantage of the industrial revolution while Crowley was sleeping. While the young soldiers were contracting new cases of shell shock, he was learning that “shell shock” was just the human name for a demon’s normal mental state. It was just that living in a dank and frigid trench watching row on row of teenagers go over the top only to be torn apart by a spray of bullets or choked by gas that burned them like holy water burned a demon—things that would have been impossible the last time Crowley saw battle of any sort—wasn't something a being who already had shell shock/a demon's normal mental state could really expose himself to without becoming a quivering, hissing wreck when he finally left the front.

He was dimly aware that Aziraphale's Mr. Ross had died, and that Aziraphale was distraught, but Crowley was in no state to be comforting anyone. Besides, he didn't want the angel to feel like he had to comfort _him_ when he was still grieving. The best thing to do in this situation was to steer clear of England and France and drink until he'd repressed himself enough to be functional again. And to Crowley's mind, that meant going to Berlin.

It was a miserable bloody place, to be sure, but that suited Crowley's mood fine. There were the nightclubs and cabarets where Crowley found good drink and loud jazz, people of every gender imaginable living in the shadow of and in open defiance of death, leaning on each other without getting too close because the world was a shambles and if the war hadn't got you, the Spanish Flu would. Sometimes, when he was awake during the day and had remembered to sober up before going to sleep the night before, he'd pop by the cinema and witness the strangest, darkest, most complex storytelling he'd ever seen.

Cinema was what pulled Crowley out of his drunken haze, in the end. _Different from the Others_ wasn't Crowley's sort of German silent film; it was cheesy, it was preachy, it didn't use light or _mis en scène_ in interesting ways, it wasn't _fun_. But then at the end, reality cut into it in the form of Dr. Magnus Hirschfield and his plea that the German government repeal Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code, the section of the law banning "unnatural fornication" on pain of imprisonment and loss of civil rights.

It wasn't that Crowley was inspired. It was a great thing Dr. Hirschfield was doing. Noble. Science had been used to encourage so much evil: chattel slavery, child labor, polluted cities, imperialism, chemical warfare. Those were what Hell would want Crowley to encourage, and this was exactly the sort of thing he should be working against.

So of course he had to look into it further so that he could prevent the spread of goodness. He followed Dr. Hirschfield's career as he established his Institute for Sexual Research and began making breakthroughs in sexuality studies. And if he encouraged some of the wayward youths in his clubs to take advantage of Dr. Hirschfield's free lodgings at the Institute, or if in conversations with certain sorts of performers at certain sorts of bars he peppered in mentions of the surgeries often conducted at the Institute, well, it was only to see what his new human adversary was capable of. He was still in the clubs encouraging greed, pride, lust, and general degeneracy.

By the mid-twenties he felt he'd put the war behind him enough to return to England, but he'd come to rather like his decadent lot and wasn't ready to pull out entirely. Especially not when he saw the writing on the wall in 1929. He felt, quite cynically, that if he spent enough time in Germany over the next decade he'd probably earn himself a commendation that would get Hell off his back for the rest of the century. And if he managed to get a few of his new friends out before shit hit the fan, so what? There was enough evil coming that the little selfish good he did wouldn't do much to offset that.

He was right about the commendation. It was the highest praise he'd ever received from his superiors. This time, he knew better than to go looking at the thing he was being commended for.

 

* * *

 

In the latter half of the twentieth century, Aziraphale more or less withdrew from human friendships.

"I don't know that it was entirely appropriate for an angel," he claimed over dinner one night, although Crowley suspected it was less to do with propriety and more to do with what his heart could handle. Bosie had lived until 1945, and if that wasn't sick irony neither of them knew _what_ to call it.

Crowley could never quite make himself withdraw like that. After all the work he'd put in to catch up with the times, he wasn't about to fall behind again, and after everything that had happened he couldn't bring himself to abandon his humans.

He didn't know when he'd started thinking of them as his, but there it was. There was no other group of people on Earth who were so easy for Crowley to help out and get away with it. As far as he could tell, Heaven didn't particularly care about debauchery on its own, but Hell didn't know that and felt that the optics of debauchery made sin look a lot more tempting. Marginalization also tended to lead to a lot more crimes of poverty, which were technically still sins, so Crowley had plenty of plausible deniability if, between his work with mass media and communication and infrastructure planning, he decided to do some more individual temptation at gay pubs and bathhouses. It was nostalgic, he could claim. Just like the old days.

And, yes, he helped people out of scrapes when he heard about them, and after Stonewall he nudged anyone he could into political activism and stood on the sidelines of a few Pride rallies, but it was entirely selfish. Every good deed he did outside of the Arrangement was a little act of defiance against Hell, and, again, they were _his_ humans. If he wanted to do a bit of good for them without balancing it with some sort of evil deed, that was his bloody prerogative, because… Well, alright, it was a weak excuse.

The truth of the matter was, he felt a sort of kinship with them. There was the matter of Crowley's own relationship to gender and sexuality, of course, but there were more concrete ways in which he and his queer lot were alike. They were cast out of their homes, forced to live apart from a world that often hated them, but unlike demons they'd made something of it. They built new homes for themselves, fashioned new names and personas that ended up being more authentic and wonderful than the people society had initially rejected. Crowley would have given anything to be able to do that instead of needing to come up with half-baked excuses to help out the people he'd come to consider his community.

He couldn't help wondering if that was what Aziraphale saw, too, a place where he could be himself instead of what Heaven expected him to be. Crowley noted with interest that, while he'd stopped paying attention to the world, he never left Soho. They bumped into each other quite a lot, and Aziraphale always gave Crowley that same infuriating look he had at the Cave of the Golden Calf.

 

* * *

 

In 1979, the Antichrist arrived on Earth, and suddenly Crowley didn't have much time for his humans. He did make a point of attending Pits and Perverts in 1983, because when there was an event sticking it to Margaret Thatcher with a name like that how could he not? There were also plenty of funerals to attend, but he didn't let himself dwell on that. If he stopped for even a second, there wouldn't be any Earth left to bury people in.

 

* * *

 

When the world didn't end, Crowley and Aziraphale held their breaths waiting for the other shoe to drop. It never did, and slowly but surely they allowed themselves to continue living out their lives. In September of 1990, they resumed tempting and thwarting. In August of 1991, they toasted a year of Earth's borrowed time. They'd continued toasting throughout the night, and eventually they were both drunk enough to admit that, if they'd gone to the trouble of saving the only place their unlikely relationship could ever exist, they might as well stop beating around the bush and take that relationship to its natural conclusion.

And so life went on, now a lot warmer, a lot more open, a lot more loving. The world changed around them, as it always had. It changed for Crowley's favorite humans, too. New medicines kept them alive longer and longer, and the world began to sympathize with them a little more every year. It was still difficult, and he didn't know if the struggle would ever be quite done, but things were getting better.

In 2013, same gender couples were given the right to marry in the United Kingdom.

“Isn’t it wonderful, my dear?" asked Aziraphale, who was holding Crowley's hand. They'd been in the back of Aziraphale's shop and headed outside when they heard commotion in the streets, only to find a mass of rainbow-clad people of all ages hugging, kissing, and crying.

Crowley grunted sullenly. Easy for Aziraphale to say. He was allowed to want wonderful things for people. Even where he'd found space to indulge in a tiny bit of good, Crowley couldn't be happy when good came about because the more society recognized these people, the less they needed Crowley. And that was awful, he knew, but wasn't he meant to be awful? If anything, he'd been wrong in the first place for wanting to be needed the way they had and he deserved to feel guilty for it.

But that was stupid. He and Aziraphale hardly worked anymore. They did it out of habit, sure, but they didn’t _need_ to. Heaven and Hell were leaving well enough alone thanks to Adam, and if they thought about it they were really free to do whatever they wanted. There was still so much work to be done so it wasn't as though he was irrelevant yet, but it was time to start preparing for that eventuality. One day they weren't going to need his help, so he had to find a way to stop needing them.

He looked at Aziraphale—properly, as he often did these days—and realized over again that what he’d always needed was right in front of him. “Look, angel, a bunch of this lot are all getting their happy endings.” His mouth was getting dry, and if he wasn’t careful he was going to start hissing. He smiled. “When do we get ours, eh?”

Aziraphale furrowed his brow. “Whatever do you mean, dearest?”

Putting on his best mischievous smirk, endlessly grateful they were around humans and he was wearing sunglasses, Crowley took Aziraphale’s hand and got down on one knee.

The crowd around them tittered and cheered, forming a circle around them and taking pictures on their phones. Several people shouted for Aziraphale to say yes.

Aziraphale gasped. He put a hand to his heart and stared at Crowley, and then he started laughing. ”Are you being serious?”

“Aziraphale!” Crowley scolded in mock offense. “I am down on one knee, bearing my heart and whatever I have that amounts to a _soul_ for you, asking you to join me in the grand adventure of marriage, and you ask me if I’m serious?”

He pulled him up from his knee and kissed his knuckles. “What is it you’re really asking?” he asked quietly so the crowd couldn’t hear them.

“Let’s retire,” said Crowley. “For as long as we’re allowed, anyway. We don’t have to be working and after six thousand wasted bloody years, I think it's about time we had a moment to ourselves.”

Aziraphale smiled. “And the marriage?”

He shrugged as though the idea didn’t make his heart do backflips. “It’s a human thing, but I don’t mind throwing a party. After all, it’s legal now.”

“Then we’ll get married.”

Crowley grinned and kissed him, and then he turned to the crowd. “He said yes!” he shouted.

The crowd cheered and began to assault them with congratulations, not to mention an inordinate number of glittery plastic accessories everyone had been storing from last Pride. Eventually they were able to break away from the crowd, and make their way back to Aziraphale's shop. They sat in the quiet, music and cheering still drifting in from the street, and for once Crowley felt unashamed to be so happy to have something good in his life.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on Tumblr at [crowleyraejepsen](https://crowleyraejepsen.tumblr.com)!


End file.
